Ground state energies of quantum dots in high magnetic fields: a new approach

We present a method for calculating ground state properties of quantum dots in high magnetic fields which takes into account the equilibrium positions of electrons in a Wigner cluster to minimize the interaction energy and is optimized for the high field limit. Assuming perfect spin alignment the many-body trial function is a single Slater determinant of overlapping oscillator functions from the lowest Landau level centered at and near the classical equilibrium positions. We obtain an analytic expression for the ground state energy and present numerical results for up to N=40.